Ari Soemarno, the CEO of Pertamina in the 2006/2009 period, shared the three characteristics of a leader he upholds and tries to execute, namely: being a role model, an innovative spirit-builder, and able to push and motivate subordinates to keep moving forward.
“Leadership is an art,” said the Business Strategy and Enterprise Modeling’s guest lecturer on Wednesday (6/7/2022).
As a leader, Ari’s guideline is to pursue excellence. To seek that, he needs continuous improvement and readiness to face any changes. By this practices, he managed to lead Pertamina and bring an enormous change to it.
During this session, Ari also talked about his change in Pertamina. During his early days, he raised the salary of all Pertamina employees threefold. He did that to transform Pertamina’s employees to increase their discipline and performance. As a follow-up, he also established a newly transparent system.
Ari also welcomed students to ask him questions to make the session more insightful. One of them was Melissa, who asked how leaders can initiate a change in a company or organization.
Ari responded that there would be plenty of obstacles when initiating change. However, the crucial ones are that we must be willing to change and have a tenacious mindset. As we do not always have to be the person to execute the change, we can outsource people from a trusted consulting firm to help.
